The exemplary embodiment relates to electronic mail systems and has particular application in connection with a system and method for detection of circularity in out-of-office e-mail messages.
Most e-mail applications allow users to enable an auto-reply function that automatically sends a response to incoming e-mail messages with a customized message sent to the sender's e-mail address. If the user plans to be absent from an office, the usual practice is for the user to set an out-of-office message which automatically responds with the indicated dates of the absence, the reason for the absence, and specifies at least one alternate contact. The user may provide a telephone, fax, e-mail, and/or other contact information for the alternate contact(s). The out-of-office message generally informs the sender that the recipient of the e-mail will not be responding to the email in a timely manner.
One problem with out-of-office messages occurs when both the user and a named alternate contact are both absent and at least has named the other as an alternate contact. If a sender attempts to contact a primary recipient they will receive an out-of-office message instructing the sender to contact the alternate contact. When the sender attempts to contact the alternate contact, he/she will receive an out-of-office message instructing them to contact another alternate contact.
The sender is presented with a cascading out-of-office message which can waste time, can be frustrating at times, and may have a negative impact to the reputation of an organization. Even further, the sender can be presented with a circular out-of-office message where the alternate contact has enabled an out-of-office message which instructs the sender to contact the primary recipient creating a circular loop. Cascading and circular out-of-office messages tend to be more prevalent during holidays when co-workers take overlapping vacation leave without consulting one another ahead of time.
There remains a need for a system and method for detecting circularity, cascading, and/or relevance in out-of-office messages.
Incorporation by Reference
The following references, the disclosures of which are incorporated herein in their entireties, by reference, are mentioned:
U.S. application Ser. No. 12/484,569, filed Jun. 15, 2009, entitled NATURAL LANGUAGE INTERFACE FOR COLLABORATIVE EVENT SCHEDULING, by Brun, et al. discloses a collaborative event scheduling method which includes, for each of a plurality of users, receiving a user's availability announcement in a natural language in response to a collaborative event scheduling request for which a time for an event is to be established within a time window defined by an event initiator, based on the users' availability announcements. Based on the availability announcement, with a computer processor, a representation of the user's availability within the time window is generated, including extracting a temporal expression from the availability announcement, if the temporal expression is determined to be referential, normalizing the extracted temporal expression, identifying an availability modality for each extracted temporal expression from a set of availability modalities, and generating the representation based on the normalized temporal expression and availability modality. The generated representation is output to an event scheduler for establishing a suitable time for the event, within the time window, based on the availability announcements of the users.
U.S. Publication No. 2009/0235280, published Sep. 17, 2009, entitled EVENT EXTRACTION SYSTEM FOR ELECTRONIC MESSAGES, by Tannier, discloses an event extraction system includes a temporal module which extracts temporal expressions in text content of an electronic mail message. A calendar entry generation module generates a candidate calendar entry based on an extracted temporal expression and presents it to a user for consideration as a calendar entry. The candidate calendar entry can be displayed in a transient pop up window, allowing a user to ignore the candidate entry or to accept it.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,574,349, issued Aug. 11, 2009, entitled STATISTICAL LANGUAGE-MODEL BASED SYSTEM FOR DETECTION OF MISSING ATTACHMENTS, by Perronnin, et al., discloses a method for processing electronic mail which includes computing a probability that a text string in an electronic mail message refers to an attachment as a function of a stored probability value for each of a plurality of sequences of words within the text string. Where the email message lacks an attachment, the method includes prompting a user if the computed probability indicates that the text string refers to an attachment.
U.S. Publication No. 20070005343, published Jan. 4, 2007, entitled CONCEPT MATCHING, and U.S. Publication No. 20070005344, published Jan. 4, 2007, entitled CONCEPT MATCHING SYSTEM, by Sandor and Kaplan disclose a method for developing a system for retrieving text related to a selected concept within a text corpus and a system developed by the method. Semantic classes which express the concept are each associated with a set of keywords. Syntactic rules are established which are to be applied to retrieved text which includes keywords. Each of the syntactic rules identifies a first of the semantic classes and a second of the semantic classes. A rule is satisfied when a keyword from the first of the semantic classes is in a syntactic relationship with a keyword from the second of the semantic classes.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,058,567, issued Jun. 6, 2006, entitled NATURAL LANGUAGE PARSER, by Aït-Mokhtar, et al. discloses a method and a parser for syntactically analyzing an input string.